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90-glossary 4,988 words about 22 min

Glossary of mechanics

Every mechanic in the taxonomy, grouped by family. Each row gives the mechanic's one-line summary, the number of catalog games that use it, and the release year of the first catalog game that does. The name links to the full record, with the definition, the levers a designer can turn, the failure modes, and the sources.

Resources & production

Stocks of goods and the rules that create, convert, store, or destroy them.

mechanic summary games first seen
Byproducts and waste Production emits secondary outputs such as sludge, garbage, heat, or spent fuel that must be handled or they impair the system. 3 2017
Crop cultivation Planted crops progress through growth stages over days or seasons depending on water, soil, and season, then are harvested. 25 1968
Deposit depletion Extractable deposits hold finite quantities and run out, forcing expansion, relocation, or substitution. 5 1994
Goods consumption A population consumes goods at per-capita rates; unmet consumption lowers satisfaction or blocks advancement. 17 1968
Hand crafting The player or avatar combines carried components into items from a recipe list, gated by workstations and known recipes. 18 1997
Machine boosting Per-machine modifiers such as modules, beacons, clock speed, or coatings trade extra power, scarce items, or currency for faster or more productive machines. 5 2013
Power allocation The player splits a fixed power budget among a vehicle's subsystems in real time, trading shields, weapons, engines, and life support against each other. 2 2012
Power grid Generators produce energy that is distributed over a connected network to consumers; shortfalls cause brownouts or shutdowns. 22 1989
Production chains Buildings or machines convert input goods into output goods via fixed recipes and cycle times, forming multi-step dependency trees. 38 1983
Quality tiers Produced items carry quality grades derived from inputs, worker skill, or chance, scaling their value or effect. 4 1995
Renewable regrowth Harvested stocks such as forests, fish, game, and soil regenerate over time at density-dependent rates, allowing sustainable yield or overexploitation. 6 2012
Resource extraction Workers or machines harvest raw materials from map nodes (ore, trees, fish, oil) at rates set by tools, labor, and node richness. 29 1982
Spoilage Perishable goods lose value or rot over time depending on storage conditions such as temperature and containers. 10 1968
Storage and buffers Goods occupy finite storage; buffers decouple producers from consumers, and full storage blocks production. 19 1998

Logistics & networks

Movement of goods, people, energy, or service coverage across space or graphs.

mechanic summary games first seen
Conveyor transport Items move continuously on belts or lanes with throughput limits, splitters, merges, and priorities. 9 2013
Fluid pipe networks Fluids such as water, oil, sewage, or gas flow through pipes with pressure or throughput limits between producers and consumers. 12 1993
Hauling jobs Agents pick up and carry items between locations via a job queue, making hauling capacity a hidden throughput constraint. 5 2006
Public transit lines Player-drawn lines with stops and vehicles carry passengers whose ridership depends on coverage, frequency, and transfers. 5 2003
Rail signaling Block and path signals partition track so trains can share it without collision; throughput depends on signal design. 5 1990
Request-provider logistics Containers declare per-item requests and supplies, and a dispatcher sends drones or robots from providers to requesters without fixed routes. 2 2013
Road networks Roads and paths define connectivity; buildings must connect to function, and travel cost depends on network geometry. 8 1991
Service coverage Service buildings such as police, fire, clinics, and schools satisfy demand within a radius or network distance, up to a capacity. 11 1989
Service queues Agents wait in lines for limited-capacity services; waiting time feeds back into satisfaction and throughput. 7 1994
Supply lines Remote units or outposts need a continuous connection to a supply source; cutting the connection causes attrition. 2 2016
Traffic congestion Trips route over a capacitated network; volume beyond capacity raises travel time and delays services and deliveries. 6 1989
Travel mode choice Agents choose among walking, cycling, driving, and transit for each trip by comparing time, money, and comfort costs, which sets how demand splits across networks. 2 2015
Vehicle routes and schedules Vehicles are assigned ordered stops with load and unload rules to move goods or passengers between nodes. 10 1990
Walker service delivery Services are delivered by agents walking routes from their building, so coverage depends on where walkers actually go. 2 1998

Economy & finance

Money, prices, markets, debt, and valuation.

mechanic summary games first seen
Advertising and awareness Spending on advertising raises a demand or awareness stock that decays without upkeep and scales how many customers arrive or buy. 7 1973
Auctions Goods, land, or rights are allocated by bidding procedures in which players or agents compete on price under rules for timing, ties, and reserves. 4 1983
Contracts and orders Discrete jobs with requirements, deadlines, and payouts, such as deliveries or commissions, drive income and planning. 17 1994
Customer value choice Customers choose among offerings by comparing price to perceived value and personal preference. 8 1973
Delivery-time payment Payment for a delivery depends on cargo type, quantity, distance, and transit time, with each cargo losing value at its own rate the longer it travels. 2 1990
Equity and buyouts Companies issue shares whose price tracks performance, and players buy them for profit or accumulate a majority to take control of rivals. 4 1990
Labor market Workers fill jobs by type and education; mismatches create unemployment or labor shortages that throttle production. 5 1998
Land value Each location's value is computed from nearby amenities, nuisances, and access, and it drives density and building upgrades. 5 1989
Loans and debt Capital can be borrowed at interest with repayment schedules, so leverage accelerates both growth and failure. 14 1990
Negotiation The player and an AI party exchange offers and counteroffers over wages, prices, or contract terms against the AI's hidden reservation value until a deal is struck or talks fail. 4 1994
Player-driven markets Players post buy and sell orders in shared order books, and prices emerge from player behavior. 5 2003
Product development The player configures a product's features, and a simulated market scores it against trends, quality, and competition. 4 1997
RCI demand A demand signal for residential, commercial, and industrial land derived from the balance of jobs, workers, and goods. 4 1989
Rival firms AI or player competitors contest markets, prices, and assets; market share decides who wins. 8 1983
Staff hiring and rosters The player hires individual staff with skills, traits, and wages to operate a facility or team. 17 1994
Supply-demand pricing Prices adjust to supply and demand, so scarcity raises prices and gluts lower them. 10 1983
Taxation Player-set tax rates convert economic activity into revenue at the cost of growth, happiness, or competitiveness. 14 1989
Trade routes Goods are exchanged between settlements, regions, or foreign markets along routes with price differences, tariffs, and transit time. 17 1984
Treasury and budget A money stock with income and expense flows such as taxes, upkeep, wages, and service funding; a negative balance leads to debt or failure. 29 1973

Agents & behavior

Individual agents' needs, decisions, schedules, skills, and internal states.

mechanic summary games first seen
Agent pathfinding Agents compute routes through space using movement costs, and the routes they choose shape congestion, travel time, and access. 9 1994
Agent skills Agents gain skill through practice or training, and skill sets work speed, quality, and access to tasks. 35 1993
Aspirations and wants An agent's long-term aspiration and current state generate short-horizon wants, and sometimes fears, whose fulfillment pays into a reward meter or currency. 3 2004
Attribute-driven match engine Contest outcomes are simulated play by play from participant attributes, tactics, and randomness instead of being played directly. 3 1999
Autonomy levels The degree to which agents act on their own is adjustable, from full free will to explicit commands only. 3 2000
Creature learning A creature's behavior is learned from player reward and punishment or from neural adaptation over its life. 4 1996
Crowd preferences Large visitor populations with individual preferences, budgets, and tolerances choose attractions and react with visible thoughts. 6 1994
Daily schedules Agents follow time-blocked routines for work, sleep, and leisure that create rhythms of demand across the day. 8 1985
Memories and thoughts Events create itemized, time-limited mood modifiers or lasting memories that shape later behavior. 10 1999
Mood and breakdowns Mood aggregates needs, memories, and environment, and crossing thresholds triggers mental breaks or inspired performance. 8 2006
Needs decay Each agent has needs such as hunger, energy, social, and fun that decay over time and are restored by actions. 30 1985
Personality traits Fixed or slow-changing traits change each agent's needs, preferences, and available actions. 25 1985
Smart objects Objects advertise the need satisfaction they offer, and agents query nearby objects to decide what to do. 4 2000
Stress accumulation A slow per-agent stress stock integrates negative experiences scaled by personality and, as it crosses levels, triggers breaks or lasting changes. 2 2006
Utility action selection Agents choose actions by scoring options against needs and context, then picking the highest or sampling among high scores. 18 1994
Work priorities The player sets which agents do which job types in what order, and agents self-assign from that priority table. 6 1991

Social relations

Pairwise and group relationships, reputation, factions, conversation, and norms.

mechanic summary games first seen
Faction diplomacy Factions hold relations with each other, and treaties, alliances, and wars follow from interests and opinion. 15 1985
Gossip propagation Information about events spreads through social contacts, changing what agents know and believe. 3 2023
Natural-language interaction The player communicates with characters by free text or voice, and the system interprets intent and responds. 11 1985
Opinion modifiers Opinions are sums of named, decaying modifiers from events and traits, itemized for the player. 2 2013
Relationship values Pairwise numeric affinity between characters changes with interactions and drives social choices. 21 1996
Reputation A standing value with a faction or the public changes access, prices, and how others respond. 23 1984
Romance and family Agents court, partner, marry, and form families according to compatibility and relationship state. 12 1996
Social exchanges Discrete social moves such as flirt, insult, or apologize have preconditions on social state and norms, and they update relationships. 7 2000

Population & lineage

Birth, death, aging, migration, inheritance, and population structure.

mechanic summary games first seen
Culture and religion conversion Provinces or population groups carry culture and faith identities that drift or are converted by missionaries, policies, and rulers, changing unrest, opinion, and bonuses. 4 2013
Dynasty succession When the player character dies, play continues as an heir chosen by inheritance rules. 3 2013
Education and workforce Education levels gate job types, and schooling converts the labor pool into higher levels over time. 3 2015
Immigration by attractiveness Population arrives or leaves based on attractiveness such as jobs, housing, and happiness relative to alternatives. 4 2006
Lifecycle and aging Agents are born, age through life stages with different capabilities, and die. 23 1991
Natural selection Differential survival and reproduction by fitness shifts trait distributions across generations. 3 1990
Off-screen life progression Households or agents outside the player's active simulation advance through life events on a cheap stochastic model, so the world changes between visits. 3 2009
Population strata The population is divided into classes or tiers with distinct needs, roles, and upgrade paths. 13 1991
Trait inheritance Offspring inherit traits or genes from their parents with recombination, variation, or mutation. 7 1992

Governance & policy

Laws, policies, elections, legitimacy, and institutional rules.

mechanic summary games first seen
Citizen satisfaction An aggregate satisfaction score computed from services, conditions, and events modulates growth, productivity, and unrest. 10 1982
Corruption leakage A corruption level driven by spending, administrative reach, or size removes a share of revenue or output until countermeasures bring it down. 4 1991
Elections Periodic votes by simulated or real voters determine tenure or policy. 7 2003
Interest groups Factions within a polity have clout and preferences over policies, and their approval gates what the player can do. 6 2013
Player legislation Players author, propose, and vote on rules that the game then enforces inside a shared world, such as taxes, bans, and permits. 2 2003
Policy influence network Policies, indicators, and voter groups connect through a weighted causal graph with delays. 1 2020
Policy toggles Enactable laws or policies change simulation rules with explicit tradeoffs. 15 1991
Political capital An abstract governing currency accrues each period from leaders, factions, or population welfare and is spent on policy changes, edicts, and other state actions. 7 2013
Stability and unrest Grievances accumulate into unrest that triggers protests, strikes, or revolt. 12 1982

Space & construction

Placement, zoning, layout, terrain, and built structure.

mechanic summary games first seen
Adjacency scoring A placement's value is computed from a table of bonuses and penalties for the placements around it. 4 1983
Building placement The player places discrete structures on a grid or freely, and placement constraints turn layout into a spatial puzzle. 77 1970
Decoration and beauty Decorative objects and scenery carry beauty values that are aggregated over tiles, rooms, or radii and feed agent mood or ratings. 11 1998
Design performance rating Player-built designs are run or analyzed and scored on simulated metrics such as ride excitement, bridge stress, or cost and cycles. 8 1999
Modular assembly The player builds machines, vehicles, or creatures from parts whose stats and physical arrangement determine how the result behaves. 27 1993
Procedural build assist Coarse player input such as a block or a drawn wall is turned into detailed, organic structures by procedural rules. 2 2020
Room recognition Enclosed spaces are detected by flood fill and classified into room types by their size and contents, and the type grants effects. 6 2006
Structural integrity Structures carry support values or loads propagated from the ground, and elements that lose support or exceed their limits collapse. 5 2015
Terraforming The player raises, lowers, flattens, or repaints terrain, usually at a cost, to make land usable or to reshape water and paths. 19 1989
Track laying The player builds rail or coaster track segment by segment under grade, curvature, terrain, and cost constraints, and vehicles then run on the resulting path. 5 1990
Vertical layers The world has stacked layers such as z-levels, floors, or underground networks, and rules connect what happens between them. 9 1991
Zoning The player paints land-use zones, and the simulation decides whether and what to build, upgrade, or abandon on each zoned lot. 10 1989

Physics & materials

Forces, motion, materials, fluids, heat, and destruction.

mechanic summary games first seen
Falling-sand materials Every pixel or cell holds a material whose class rule makes it fall, flow, or rise by swapping with neighbors, with reactions layered on top. 2 2008
Flight aerodynamics Lift, drag, thrust, and control-surface forces computed from airspeed and attitude govern aircraft motion. 5 1995
Fluid and gas simulation Liquids and gases stored per cell or as fields flow, mix, and pressurize across space according to pressure and density differences. 11 2006
Heat transfer Temperature diffuses between cells, materials, and objects by conductivity and heat capacity, and thresholds trigger phase changes and damage. 9 2006
Material interactions A rule table defines how elements such as fire, water, and electricity change materials and each other on contact. 8 1993
Orbital mechanics Bodies move under gravity, and maneuvers spend delta-v to change orbits, intercepts, and transfers. 2 2008
Projectile ballistics Shots are simulated as projectiles in flight with velocity, gravity, drag, and penetration, so range, angle, and lead decide hits rather than an instant trace or a dice roll. 4 2005
Rigid-body physics Objects with mass and inertia move under forces and collide, constrained by contacts and joints solved each step. 13 1993
Soft-body deformation Objects built from mass nodes and spring beams bend, crumple, and break under stress, and deformation persists. 1 2013
Terrain deformation Wheels, feet, and impacts displace soft ground such as mud and snow, and the persistent ruts change traction for later passes. 2 2020
Vehicle dynamics Tire, suspension, drivetrain, and weight-transfer models compute vehicle handling from forces at each wheel. 9 1997
Voxel destruction The world is built from small destructible units that can be removed, broken loose, and burned anywhere. 2 2013

Environment & ecology

Weather, seasons, ecosystems, contagion, pollution, and hydrology.

mechanic summary games first seen
Contagion Disease spreads between agents or regions via contact rates and moves hosts through compartments such as susceptible, infected, and recovered. 10 1996
Day-night cycle A diurnal cycle changes light, visibility, temperature, and which agents are active, so activity follows the hour of the day. 20 1995
Fire spread Fire ignites and spreads across flammable cells or objects at rates set by fuel, wind, and moisture, consuming what it burns. 18 1989
Food web Species eat and are eaten along a feeding graph, so populations rise, crash, and oscillate under predator-prey dynamics. 4 1992
Habitat suitability Species or crops thrive only where conditions such as terrain, temperature, water, and cover match their needs, scored per location. 12 1989
Hydrology Water flows across terrain and through rivers by height differences, producing floods, droughts, irrigation, and dam management. 4 1999
Planetary climate Planet-scale variables such as atmospheric composition, temperature, sea level, and biosphere evolve under coupled feedbacks and can be deliberately altered. 5 1990
Pollution spread Pollution emitted by sources accumulates and diffuses across land, water, or air cells and harms health, land value, or growth, or provokes threats. 7 1989
Seasons A seasonal calendar cycles conditions such as temperature, daylight, and growing windows that govern growth, demand, and risk. 16 1996
Weather Weather states such as rain, storms, snow, wind, and temperature change over time and modify activities and other systems. 27 1971

Biology & health

Bodies, injury, disease, survival meters, and creature care.

mechanic summary games first seen
Animal husbandry Domestic animals are housed, fed, tended, and bred, and they yield products whose quantity and quality depend on their care. 9 1996
Care-dependent development A creature's or character's accumulated care or attribute history selects which form or outcome it develops into at each stage boundary, from a fixed branching table. 2 1993
Creature care The player directly feeds, cleans, and plays with a creature whose needs decay; neglect causes sickness, stunted growth, or death. 6 1985
Diagnosis and treatment Patients present symptoms, examinations reduce uncertainty about a hidden condition, and the correct treatment cures it while wrong or late treatment harms. 3 1997
Injury body model Bodies are hierarchies of parts with their own damage, and wounds, bleeding, infection, and prosthetics change capacities such as moving and manipulation. 7 2006
Survival meters The avatar's bodily stocks such as hunger, thirst, warmth, and fatigue deplete over time and, if unmanaged, drain health and kill. 13 1971

Time & pacing

How simulated time advances and how the player controls it.

mechanic summary games first seen
Crisis countdown A known future crisis such as a storm, winter, cure, or deadline is announced in advance, and the remaining time structures preparation. 10 2011
Daily action budget A per-day pool of energy, stamina, or time slots limits how many actions the player can take, and the day's end resets it and forces prioritization. 5 1993
Pause and speed control The player pauses the simulation and switches between speed multipliers, trading attention against elapsed game time. 83 1970
Periodic ticks Some state changes, such as budgets, harvests, or growth, resolve in batches at fixed intervals like a month or a year rather than continuously. 4 1982
Real-time clock Game time follows the real-world clock and calendar, so the world advances, ages, and holds events while the game is closed. 8 1996
Turn structure The simulation advances in discrete turns, each divided into ordered phases in which players decide and the world then resolves. 12 1968

Information & legibility

How simulation state is revealed, hidden, summarized, or explained to the player.

mechanic summary games first seen
Advisors In-world advisor characters monitor simulation indicators, summarize problems, and recommend actions. 6 1968
Agent inspection Selecting an agent opens a panel that reveals its needs, mood contributors, current job, and the reasons behind its behavior. 5 1996
Alerts feed A notification layer surfaces discrete events and threshold crossings with severity and a link to their location. 3 1985
Causal breakdown tooltips Hovering a derived value shows the named modifiers that produce it, and terms inside the tooltip can be hovered in turn. 3 2013
Comparative histograms A player's solution is plotted against distributions of other players' scores on several metrics. 2 2011
Data overlays Map layers visualize hidden variables such as land value, pollution, coverage, or traffic. 5 1985
Fog of war Parts of the world stay hidden or stale until observed by the player's units, structures, or sensors. 13 1991
Forecasting The interface projects future states such as resource runway, budget balance, or upcoming weather. 2 1973
Scouting knowledge Entity attributes are known only with uncertainty that scouting effort reduces. 4 1999
Stats dashboards Graphs and tables show the recorded history of simulation variables over selectable time windows. 7 1992

Control & automation

How player intent is expressed, delegated, or automated.

mechanic summary games first seen
Blueprints Player-made layouts can be saved, stamped as build orders, copied, and shared as text or files. 11 1995
Delegation to AI managers Subsystems are handed to AI managers or governors that pursue player-set goals within bounds. 7 1995
Designation orders The player marks tiles or objects for work such as dig, chop, or build, and autonomous agents claim and execute the jobs. 5 2006
Direct avatar control The player directly controls one embodied character's movement and actions in the simulated world. 31 1983
Embodied skill control Real-time motor skill operating a simulated mechanism, such as hand-flying, driving, or surgery, is the main challenge. 14 1984
Execution budget Player-written programs are metered against a simulated compute budget, such as CPU per tick, tick cost per operation, instruction slots, or RAM, which makes efficiency the scarce resource. 4 2014
God powers The player spends a power resource on miracles that alter terrain, weather, or creatures. 5 1989
Player programming The player writes code in a language the game executes to control units, machines, or the world. 10 2003
Programming by demonstration An agent or vehicle learns a routine by recording the player performing it, and the recording becomes a replayable, sometimes editable, program. 2 2019
Signal circuits In-world wires, sensors, and logic elements carry signals that read machine state and control machines. 12 1993
Unit commands The player issues direct orders to specific units or agents, overriding their autonomous behavior. 18 1982

Progression & goals

Unlocks, research, milestones, and scenario structure.

mechanic summary games first seen
Career ladder Characters advance through ranked job levels by meeting skill, relationship, and performance requirements. 13 1993
Collection goals Catalogs of items, species, or bundles give the player sets to complete for rewards or recognition. 7 1997
Combination discovery The player combines owned elements to discover the products of a hidden recipe graph, and finding recipes is itself the goal. 2 2019
Dated technology timeline New vehicle models, platforms, or products enter and leave availability on a calendar tied to in-game dates rather than to research, forcing fleet or platform renewal. 5 1990
Megaproject sink A terminal construction absorbs very large quantities of produced goods in staged phases and serves as the long-run goal and output sink of a production game. 6 1999
Milestone unlocks Reaching thresholds such as population, output, or score unlocks new buildings, areas, or features. 24 1984
Scenario objectives Preset maps or situations come with explicit goals, constraints, and often a deadline. 40 1989
Tech tree A research or unlock graph gates buildings, recipes, or abilities behind prerequisites and accumulated research. 43 1991

Risk & failure

Disasters, threats, degradation, and fail states.

mechanic summary games first seen
Adaptive threat scaling Threat intensity is computed from a measure of the player's strength, such as wealth, population, time survived, or recent performance. 9 2006
Board confidence An evaluator such as a board, owner, or chairman sets expectations, updates a confidence stock from results against them, and fires the player below a threshold. 3 1999
Crime and policing Crime levels arise from local conditions such as land value, density, or unemployment, and police coverage, prisons, and justice reduce them. 6 1989
Loss on death When a character or ship is destroyed, its carried or fitted assets are lost or dropped at the death site for the owner or others to recover, with insurance or retrieval rules as softeners. 4 1997
Permadeath Death of agents or the avatar is permanent, and the save system prevents undoing it. 21 1971
Random disasters Stochastic disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, storms, or meteors strike at random times and places and damage the system. 19 1968
Stimulus attraction Player actions emit sound or light stimuli with a radius and decay, and agents that perceive them move toward the source, so managing emissions is part of survival. 2 2011
Subsystem damage A vehicle or ship is a set of named components with their own integrity, and damage to one removes its capacity, such as power, thrust, shields, or sensors, until it is repaired. 5 2008
Wear and breakdown Assets lose condition with use and age, breakdown risk rises as condition falls, and maintenance or repair restores it. 20 1994

Narrative & generation

Event selection, story structure, dialogue, and runtime content generation.

mechanic summary games first seen
Dilemma cards Discrete choice events present a situation with a few options that each shift meters, values, or flags in tradeoff. 7 2004
Generative content on demand A generative model creates new content such as text, items, recipes, or rules at runtime in response to player input. 7 2019
History chronicle The game records significant simulation events into a structured history that players can browse and other systems can reference. 2 1999
Storyteller director A director AI chooses which events to fire and when, pacing them by a model of tension and the current state. 3 2005
Triggered event chains Authored event templates fire when state conditions hold, and their outcomes schedule follow-up events that chain into multi-step stories. 17 1993
Villager requests Characters generate small requests or quests from templates whose parameters are filled from simulation state, with rewards and deadlines. 3 2009

World generation

Procedural creation of maps, histories, and initial conditions.

mechanic summary games first seen
Procedural characters Characters are generated with names, backstories, traits, skills, and appearance sampled from constrained tables or grammars. 6 1985
Procedural terrain Maps are generated from a seed through noise, erosion, climate, and placement rules. 20 1984
Real-world data feeds Simulation state is initialized or driven at runtime by external real-world data such as map imagery, elevation, star catalogs, live weather, or live traffic instead of authored or procedural content. 4 2004
Simulated history generation World generation simulates years to centuries of civilizations, figures, and events before play begins, producing the starting world. 2 2006

Multiplayer & persistence

Shared worlds, player-to-player interaction, content sharing, and modding.

mechanic summary games first seen
Asynchronous shared regions Separate players' simulations affect each other asynchronously through shared regions, visits, or exchanges of goods and services. 4 2005
Content sharing Player creations such as buildings, creatures, or blueprints are uploaded, browsed, rated, and imported into other players' games. 24 1993
Modding API Hooks for scripts and data definitions, official or through a de facto loader most modders use, let players change and extend the simulation's content and rules. 55 1995
Persistent shared world A server-side world keeps running and keeps its state for many players, whether or not any one player is logged in. 7 1997
Player organizations Players form corporations, guilds, or governments with membership, roles, permissions, and shared assets. 5 1997
PvP security zones A shared world is divided into zones whose rules set whether players may attack each other and what an aggressor pays, such as NPC police response or lost standing. 2 1997
Seasonal world reset A shared world runs for a bounded season and is then wiped and restarted, often with rule changes carried into the next season. 2 2003

Conflict & defense

Combat, raids, military units, and defense.

mechanic summary games first seen
Military operations Units with modeled sensors, weapons, platforms, and doctrine conduct operations at operational fidelity, mostly under player orders and automated behavior. 4 2005
Raid defense Settlements defend against periodic attacks with walls, turrets, traps, and fighters placed and commanded by the player. 15 1998
Statistical combat resolution Battles between units resolve from attack, defense, morale, terrain, and random rolls in rounds rather than from physics or modeled sensors and weapons. 7 1991
Territorial control Map regions have an owner and a current controller; occupation flips control in war, and peace, purchase, or integration transfers ownership at a cost in time, unrest, or political currency. 6 1991
War score and peace terms Each war tracks a score or exhaustion level from battles, occupation, and war goals, and that value caps what a peace settlement can demand or forces capitulation. 5 2013

Operation & procedure

Hands-on procedural tasks, tool use, and embodied skill.

mechanic summary games first seen
Diagnose and repair The player inspects a machine, finds faulty parts with tools and tests, disassembles in order to reach them, and repairs or replaces them. 2 2018
Procedural checklists Operating simulated equipment requires performing ordered steps on modeled controls that mirror real procedures, with system states gating each step. 6 1995
Rule-checking inspection The player checks documents, people, or cargo against a rulebook that changes over time, under time pressure, with penalties for errors. 2 2013
Surface work tools The player applies a tool to surfaces to clean, paint, or strip them, and a per-surface coverage state shows visible progress toward completion. 3 2018

Dataset dfde7895aa6d.